Trying to Import Image Sequence with 250k photos

ABPL wrote on 3/21/2015, 4:44 PM

I have a very large time lapse I am planning to make in Sony Vegas. Unfortunately I find that Sony Vegas' Import Image Sequence can't seem to handle more than ~2k photos at once.

Perhaps I could import them in ~125 separate batches of 2k, but that would be cumbersome.

Has anyone had any success with using the import image sequence feature with a very large number of photos?

Alternatively - does anyone know another program that will generate a video from my timelapse footage that Sony Vegas can open (I have found plenty that generate footage that cannot be opened by SV).

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/21/2015, 8:38 PM

I've done batches of about 12K 1920x1080 images at a time with no trouble. I haven't tried more than that. Caveat: i use Vegas Pro. I don't know if the Studio version has a lower limitation.

ABPL wrote on 3/21/2015, 9:07 PM

Thanks again.

It took quite a while, but I finally found a method that works for me.

I use Ubuntu for most of my day-to-day work, and only Windows for software programs like Vegas. So my solution requires Linux command line.

So I found a simple linux command that makes a high quality avi or mp4 file which can be read by Vegas. I had been trying this previously, but the codecs I was using was for some reason unreadable by Vegas. Now it works!

There's probably a more direct route than what I'm doing. But it seems to me like this will work - and then I will be able to finally get to using Vegas to edit my video together, add music, etc.

I'd be happy to post the video here when I'm done, if that sort of thing is allowed.

In case anyone is interested. I first run these two commands in Linux command line on my files, then switch to windows and import it in Vegas.

ls -1v *.JPG > files.txt

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=21600000 -o output.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=30 mf://@files.txt -vf scale=1920:1080

A bit complicated perhaps - yet the simplest solution I have found thus far (Vegas really does not like any of the many other video files I've created with other software programs like PhotoLapse or GoProStudio)

richard-amirault wrote on 3/21/2015, 10:17 PM

You didn't say what size each image was. Importing LARGE images might be the problem.

If so (for next time) shooting at a lower res might help. Even a 2 meg pic will still give you HD video, so an 8, 10, 12 meg or more image is overkill.